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Description
Petrified Souls
As it sailed down the Strait of Malacca between Sumatra and Malaysia in the late 1940s, a Dutch freighter called the SS Ourang Medan sent out a chilling distress call that the officers, captain—possibly the entire crew—were dead. An incoherent spate of Morse code followed, after which the ship’s radio operator issued a final sign-off: “I die.” When a US merchant ship investigated, its crew found corpses strewn across the deck, their mouths fixed in grimaces and their eyes staring out, vacant. No survivors were found. As the US ship began to tow the Ourang Medan to port, smoke billowed from the freighter’s hull. The merchant ship severed the line connecting the vessels just before the Ourang Medan exploded and sank, burying the petrified Dutch crew in a watery grave. All evidence of the ship went down with them, allowing rumors to fill the void.

In a bizarre letter dated 1959, the assistant to the director of the CIA claimed that whatever befell the Ourang Medan could explain all of the “unsolved mysteries of the sea”: the myriad airplane crashes and shipwrecks, the “fiery spheres” observed falling into, and emanating from, the ocean. (It might be worth noting that the CIA had been experimenting with LSD during this time.) To add to the mystery, no entry exists for the Dutch ship in Lloyd’s Register, which has classified large merchant ships since the late 1700s. Without that key piece of information, conspiracy theories have taken hold. One claims that nerve gas, developed in wartime Japan, had been smuggled onto the foreign freighter by the Japanese military, where it leaked, killed the crew, and eventually ignited. Others, in all seriousness, point to the fantastical: ghosts or aliens who may have played a role in the demise of the Ourang Medan’s crew.
But without any evidence of its existence, is it possible that someone simply made up the Dutch ship, its distress call, and the events that transpired on it—perhaps someone from the merchant ship, which, according to Lloyd’s Register, did exist? But regardless of whether or not the events of the SS Ourang Medan ever took place, at least we have the grisly legend to keep us awake at nigh

Description
Petrified Souls
As it sailed down the Strait of Malacca between Sumatra and Malaysia in the late 1940s, a Dutch freighter called the SS Ourang Medan sent out a chilling distress call that the officers, captain—possibly the entire crew—were dead. An incoherent spate of Morse code followed, after which the ship’s radio operator issued a final sign-off: “I die.” When a US merchant ship investigated, its crew found corpses strewn across the deck, their mouths fixed in grimaces and their eyes staring out, vacant. No survivors were found. As the US ship began to tow the Ourang Medan to port, smoke billowed from the freighter’s hull. The merchant ship severed the line connecting the vessels just before the Ourang Medan exploded and sank, burying the petrified Dutch crew in a watery grave. All evidence of the ship went down with them, allowing rumors to fill the void.

In a bizarre letter dated 1959, the assistant to the director of the CIA claimed that whatever befell the Ourang Medan could explain all of the “unsolved mysteries of the sea”: the myriad airplane crashes and shipwrecks, the “fiery spheres” observed falling into, and emanating from, the ocean. (It might be worth noting that the CIA had been experimenting with LSD during this time.) To add to the mystery, no entry exists for the Dutch ship in Lloyd’s Register, which has classified large merchant ships since the late 1700s. Without that key piece of information, conspiracy theories have taken hold. One claims that nerve gas, developed in wartime Japan, had been smuggled onto the foreign freighter by the Japanese military, where it leaked, killed the crew, and eventually ignited. Others, in all seriousness, point to the fantastical: ghosts or aliens who may have played a role in the demise of the Ourang Medan’s crew.
But without any evidence of its existence, is it possible that someone simply made up the Dutch ship, its distress call, and the events that transpired on it—perhaps someone from the merchant ship, which, according to Lloyd’s Register, did exist? But regardless of whether or not the events of the SS Ourang Medan ever took place, at least we have the grisly legend to keep us awake at nigh